IT probably wasn't the last hurrah for America's World War II veterans of Japanese ancestry. But it will be hard for this aging generation ever to match, even with the increasing help they will get from their sons and daughters. AJA vets’ reunion
will be hard to matchFor one thing, their numbers will grow steadily fewer, their mobility reduced.
They came together last weekend, mostly from Hawaii but also from the West Coast and elsewhere for their first-ever joint national convention of their famous units: 100th, 442nd, 1399th and Military Intelligence.
On Saturday, 3,100 people sat down to lunch in the new Hawaii Convention Center exhibition hall -- the biggest sit-down lunch ever served in Hawaii, because no such space was available previously.
Up front, a Caucasian four-star general rattled off the never-matched tally of honors they had won -- presidential unit citations, a Congressional Medal of Honor, other medals by the thousands and Purple Hearts for the wounded, also in the thousands.
He was followed by an AJA four-star general whose stars told it all: The highest ranks in the services now are open to AJAs, whereas they would have been unthinkable before the AJA warriors of World War II proved loyalty isn't a matter of skin color.
At the next lunch table was a retired AJA three-star general who once had been a reporter for the Honolulu Star-Bulletin. (Excuse my bragging, please.)
They were fresh from a ceremony at Kalakaua Avenue and Saratoga Road in Waikiki dedicating a Brothers in Valor monument that millions of annual visitors to Waikiki will see.
And next day they went off to a touching tribute in the Punchbowl National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific arranged by their sons and daughters.
At the beginning of their convention they had been offered a revival of the play, "Our Hearts Were Touched With Fire," a recounting of the love-hate-doubt-fear World War II dramas caused by their ethnicity.
The play ought to be committed to film. It will be hard to repeat with the large cast it requires, yet it ought not to be lost. It ranks with Terrence Knapp's solo performance in Aldyth Morris's play "Damien" as an epic story of Hawaii. "Damien" won national public TV honors.
"Hearts," of course, goes even beyond Hawaii to the mainland. Hiroshima comes in only as one poignant mention of the brother-against-brother conflict between the U.S. and Japan.
But it goes to another kind of brother-against-brother conflict in a mainland internment camp for West Coast Japanese. The injustice of internment leads one brother to go to jail rather than serve in the Army, the other to volunteer yet find himself in conflict with Hawaii AJAs in training camp. He had the smooth English of a West Coast "kotonk." They spoke the delightful pidgin of Hawaii. There were fisticuffs.
"Hearts" also tells of even Hawaii GIs smoothing out their postwar English under the GI bill, of a touching meeting with a West Coast publisher and "Jap" hater whose son had defied him to join the Army, be assigned as an AJA unit leader and be killed among them in combat in France.
IT all was underlined by newspaper headlines of the week reporting that an AJA veteran's daughter had been confirmed by the U.S. Senate as Hawaii's fourth federal district court judge.
Post-convention, one of their number, Daniel K. Inouye, now one of America's most senior and influential senators, opened his re-election headquarters, seeking a seventh six-year term that he almost certainly will win in a walk.
Not by coincidence, all of this happened over the Independence Day weekend, an awesome reassurance that the American dream expressed in the Declaration of Independence 222 years ago still lives and is reaffirmed by the AJA experience.
A.A. Smyser is the contributing editor
and former editor of the the Star-Bulletin
His column runs Tuesday and Thursday.